4 Ways Your Darkest Moment Can Positively Change Your Life

I will never forget the moment that I woke up in a hospital bed the morning after I tried to take my own life. At the age of 26 years old my marriage had ended and along with it the non profit organization that I had worked so passionately for was pulled from under me. I didn’t want to live.

After a seven year relationship my wife had walked out of the door never to return and as I sat in our apartment surrounded by everything we had built together the future looked dark and overwhelming and was certainly not one that I wanted to walk into. I turned to google and keyed in “most painless and quickest way to kill myself”.

I absolutely maintain that my attempt at wiping my existence off the face of the planet was the best thing to happen to me, it totally changed my life. Whether it’s the end of a relationship, the struggle to get a job or an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and lack of direction we all experience “dark times” in life. It is these toughest times that can turn out to be the most profound.

Let me share with you 4 ways that your darkest moments could be the making of your life, should you choose.

Forced self-intimacy

When life takes you to the darkest places absolutely no-one around you can understand how you feel or what you are going through. Others may have had a similar experience but only you can react to your situations the way that you do. During our tough times we are forced to stare ourselves eye-ball to eye-ball, as though we are standing in the mirror and gazing deep into our very soul. As we engage in these moments of forced self-intimacy we make crucial decisions that redefine who we are, what we want and what we are willing to accept or not accept for our lives. It is the choices that we are forced to make, during this darkest period, that lay the foundation of our powerful life change.

Blank canvas opportunity

We absolutely take life for granted, trying to end my life was my awakening moment to this truth. I truly recognised with my head and my heart that we live life once and so I made a decision to view my life as a blank canvas, to start again and paint whatever picture I so desired for my life. The result was that I created an eco-island business in Fiji that gained worldwide media attention, was filmed for 18 months and became a TV show that aired in the UK, Australia and America. My darkest moment became my catalyst to pursuing life in all it’s fullness and as a result I embarked upon a crazy adventure.

Benchmarked experience

When we experience a powerful life situation and nothing could feel as though it could get any worse we have then built a foundation of experience on which to build the rest of our lives. Nothing could be any worse than trying to take your own life and so I launched a bold and daring business idea – if I went bankrupt it could never be as bad as non-existence. The tough times that we endure give us a place to refer to and offer the motivation to continue. When we realised that we endure ‘X’, ‘X’ was pretty bad and as we are still more than standing we are filled with the hope that we can get through the smaller battles of today.

A moment of awakening.

There are times in our lives when everything gets on top of us and as a result we make decisions for our lives that are not healthy nor the best – wrong relationships, poor choices in patterns of behaviour, developing addictions and more. Friends and loved ones may tell us we are on a destructive path but we don’t listen as it is a path that brings us comfort at this time. I truly believe that there are times in our lives that we are given a place to breakdown. It is through this breaking down experience do we undergo a powerful transformation of letting go of the bad and the unhealthy as we undergo a moment of awakening and rebuild ourselves, who we are, what we are about and everything that we stand for, from the ground up. These are the powerful moments of awakening.

During my darkest moment in my life, the only person who truly knew what I was going through was Google, it may be the same for you. Right now, in this very moment, it’s just me and you. I want to encourage you to not simply endure this difficult situation but to grab it by the horns, to wrestle it to the ground and overcome. As you do I truly know that you will look back and be able to say that this moment, right now, was the best thing that every happened to you. I believe in you.

Mark Bowness is a life change instigator who is building a community of people who are dedicated to changing their life, changing their community and changing the world. Mark produces a whole wealth of resources to enable you to instigate your life change. The best place to start is his FREE Life Change Toolkit which includes a 5 day e-course entitled ‘How to change absolutely anything in your life’ click here to register.